Information Course Schedule spring 2014

Lower-Division

How can we critically think about emergent phenomena of the Internet? Is the Internet a democratic medium for political action (a "networked public sphere") or a surveillance apparatus of centralized control? Who has access to digital information and what techniques are used to make information artificially scarce? How do trade group lawsuits against digital "piracy" affect a generation's perception of the law? Should we look at the growing sphere of copyright as a public interest problem, or celebrate the expansion of creators' rights? Can free software thrive independently from ideological backing? Why are peer production communities like Wikipedia and Linux affected by extreme gender disparity?

In this course, we will examine the societal implications of computer networks from critical and technical perspectives. We will collectively engage with issues of intellectual property, access to information, privacy, freedom of speech, representation, and peer production. We will be discussing provocative texts and media, doing hands-on exploration of emerging technologies, and practicing ethnographic fieldwork in online communities. We will also offer opportunities for field trips and guest speakers to provide us with different perspectives. Additionally, students will engage in a semester-long collaborative project in a flexible format.

This is a student-initiated group study course (DE-Cal). Please contact the student coordinator(s) for specific questions.

Upper-Division

Prerequisites: Upper level undergraduates. This course explores the history of information and associated technologies, uncovering why we think of ours as "the information age." We will select moments in the evolution of production, recording, and storage from the earliest writing systems to the world of Short Message Service (SMS) and blogs. In every instance, we'll be concerned with both what and when and how and why, and we'll keep returning to the question of technological determinism: how do technological developments affect society and vice-versa?

This course aims to provide students with an overview of the many dynamic and interdisciplinary skills that are required for successful practice in the field of ICTD.

Information and Communications Technology for Development (ICTD) is the broad study of information technology to alleviate poverty and stimulate development (economic, social, and human) in developing and transitional countries. In the last 15 years, there has been an exponential expansion in the number of ICTD projects, but insufficient human skills to design and manage them, leading to a “forever-pilot” culture and a rather dismal failure rate. Successful oversight of these projects requires a combination of interdisciplinary and dynamic skills. This course serves to introduce students to these skills under three areas of competencies:

B. Technical: The different ways in which ICTs, through e-applications, can contribute to socioeconomic development. While specific computer skills are important, this course given its broad reach will focus on applications.

C. Management: Methods and techniques of project program planning and management, including assessment, design, funding, implementation, and evaluation.

Along with these areas, we will explore cross-cutting themes such as politics, gender, culture, and the reality of development work.

Students will be introduced to these skills through lectures and discussions (face-to face and online), as well as application to cases (possibly live consulting cases). Expect to have a lot of fun while working hard — not unlike development work in real life!

How can we critically think about emergent phenomena of the Internet? Is the Internet a democratic medium for political action (a "networked public sphere") or a surveillance apparatus of centralized control? Who has access to digital information and what techniques are used to make information artificially scarce? How do trade group lawsuits against digital "piracy" affect a generation's perception of the law? Should we look at the growing sphere of copyright as a public interest problem, or celebrate the expansion of creators' rights? Can free software thrive independently from ideological backing? Why are peer production communities like Wikipedia and Linux affected by extreme gender disparity?

In this course, we will examine the societal implications of computer networks from critical and technical perspectives. We will collectively engage with issues of intellectual property, access to information, privacy, freedom of speech, representation, and peer production. We will be discussing provocative texts and media, doing hands-on exploration of emerging technologies, and practicing ethnographic fieldwork in online communities. We will also offer opportunities for field trips and guest speakers to provide us with different perspectives. Additionally, students will engage in a semester-long collaborative project in a flexible format.

This is a student-initiated group study course (DE-Cal). Please contact the student coordinator(s) for specific questions.

Core

This course is designed to be an introduction to the topics and issues associated with information and information technology and its role in society. Throughout the semester we will consider both the consequence and impact of technologies on social groups and on social interaction and how society defines and shapes the technologies that are produced. Students will be exposed to a broad range of applied and practical problems, theoretical issues, as well as methods used in social scientific analysis. The four sections of the course are: 1) theories of technology in society, 2) information technology in workplaces 3) automation vs. humans, and 4) networked sociability.

This course uses examples from various commercial domains — retail, health, credit, entertainment, social media, and biosensing/quantified self — to explore legal and ethical issues including freedom of expression, privacy, research ethics, consumer protection, information and cybersecurity, and copyright. The class emphasizes how existing legal and policy frameworks constrain, inform, and enable the architecture, interfaces, data practices, and consumer facing policies and documentation of such offerings; and, fosters reflection on the ethical impact of information and communication technologies and the role of information professionals in legal and ethical work.

As information becomes increasingly strategic for all organizations, technology professionals must also develop the core business skills required to build personal brand, expand influence, build high-quality relationships, and deliver on critical enterprise projects. Using a combination of business and academic readings, case discussions and guest speakers, this course will explore a series of critical business topics that apply to both start-up and Fortune 500 enterprises. Subjects include: communication and presentation skills, software and product development methodologies, negotiation skills, employee engagement, organizational structures and career paths, successful interviewing, and CV preparation.

General

This course addresses concepts and methods of user experience research, from understanding and identifying needs, to evaluating concepts and designs, to assessing the usability of products and solutions. We emphasize methods of collecting and interpreting qualitative data about user activities, working both individually and in teams, and translating them into design decisions. Students gain hands-on practice with observation, interview, survey, focus groups, and expert review. Team activities and group work are required during class and for most assignments. Additional topics include research in enterprise, consulting, and startup organizations, lean/agile techniques, mobile research approaches, and strategies for communicating findings.

Three hours of lecture per week. This course focuses on managing people in information-intensive firms and industries, such as information technology industries. Topics include managing knowledge workers; managing teams (including virtual ones); collaborating across disparate units, giving and receiving feedback; managing the innovation process (including in eco-systems); managing through networks; and managing when using communication tools (e.g., tele-presence). The course relies heavily on cases as a pedagogical form.

The design and presentation of digital information. Use of graphics, animation, sound, visualization software, and hypermedia in presenting information to the user. Methods of presenting complex information to enhance comprehension and analysis. Incorporation of visualization techniques into human-computer interfaces. Three hours of lecture and one hour of laboratory per week.

Three hours of seminar per week. How does the design of new educational technology change the way people learn and think? How do we design systems that reflect our understanding of how we learn? This course explores issues on designing and evaluating technologies that support creativity and learning. The class will cover theories of creativity and learning, implications for design, as well as a survey of new educational technologies such as works in computer supported collaborative learning, digital manipulatives, and immersive learning environments. Also listed as New Media C263.

Special Topics

The mobile landscape is constantly changing — new devices, new operating systems, new applications. Even seasoned designers are overwhelmed by the chaos, sometimes creating less than optimal designs that are soon outdated. But the successful designs, the ones that surprise and delight their users, look beyond the here and now.

Designing Mobile Experiences will start with an overview of current device and OS differences, featuring guest lecturers with deep Android and iOS expertise. The second part of the course will lay the foundation to create mobile application designs that can truly stand the test of time. Some of the topics we’ll cover include: exploratory mobile research, gesture design, and touch design. The latter part of the course will introduce ways to bring apps to life through animation, sound, and prototyping.

Course material will be covered through lectures, in class activities, readings, and a group project. Early in the semester students will pitch mobile application ideas; they will spend the rest of the term iteratively designing the app with their teammates. Ongoing design critiques will be provided by the instructor, classmates, and industry leaders.

Priority for attending this class is given to I School students. Programming mobile applications will not be covered in the course.

In this course, we will survey a broad range of “alternative” thinkers — including, but not limited to, Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Ivan Illich, Paulo Freire, and E.F. Schumacher — and try to derive some potential implications of each of their ideas for the design and use of technological artifacts. For each, we will try to understand their perspectives on technology, society, and human development and the underlying values that drive these perspectives, and to apply these values to practical design considerations. The course will consist of weekly readings, discussion, and regular design activities.

This is an introductory course on design, problem solving and innovation. While the principles generalize to any context, this course focuses on solutions that take the form of digital goods and services.

This is a team-based, experiential learning course. Students who take this course should expect to:

Work with a team that includes different backgrounds, interests, and personal motivations. As a cross-listed course, teams may or may not include students from different schools across the University (depending upon enrollment).

Experience a process for identifying and prioritizing opportunities to innovate. The process scales from an entrepreneur working alone to Fortune 500 firms managing an innovation portfolio.

Formulate hypotheses and then design and execute experiments in a Lean cycle of build, measure and learn.

Teams will learn general principles of product/service design in the context of tools, methods, and concepts specific to the Web-based environment. Both desktop and mobile products and services are prototyped in the Web context to leverage common development and testing resources. For purposes of the course, the product or service should be aimed at consumers in the range 25 - 45. We define this target audience so that we can use classmates as preliminary subjects of interviews, testing, and surveys. For the purposes of this course, the product or service need not have a compelling business model. The focus is on creating a product or service that solves a real problem, not necessarily creating a new business.

This course teaches a process-oriented approach to product and service design with heavy emphasis on user experience design. Students interested in design aesthetics, semiotics and cognitive psychology should look elsewhere. Neither is this a class about technology. The course syllabus does not include tutorials on specific software packages. Students interested in technical questions such as platform selection and scaling should look elsewhere.

What insights about student learning can be revealed from data, and how can those insights be used to improve the efficacy of educational technology? This course will cover computational approaches to the task of modeling learning and improving outcomes in Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). We will cover theories and methodologies underpinning current approaches to knowledge discovery and data mining in education and survey the latest developments in the broad field of human learning research.

This course will be project based, where teams will be introduced to online learning platforms and their datasets with the objective of pairing data analysis with theory or implementation. Literature review will serve to add context and grounding to projects.

Suggested background includes one programming course and familiarity with one statistical/computational software package.

The study of learning in online environments is an interdisciplinary pursuit, and therefore all majors are welcomed and encouraged to bring complimentary backgrounds.

Undergraduates with the appropriate background and motivation are encouraged to enroll but must contact Associate Director of Student Affairs Catherine Cronquist Browning for enrollment permissions.

This course will explore the make-up of the healthcare industry, how healthcare players set strategy, the impact of system design on healthcare strategies, and the implications of these strategies on the future of the healthcare sector and society more broadly. The first two-thirds of the course will examine strategy in the US context. The last third will explore how different international models of healthcare influence strategy, and what these might mean for the future of US healthcare as well.

Open data — data that is free for use, reuse, and redistribution — is an intellectual treasure-trove that has given rise to many unexpected and often fruitful applications. In this course, students will 1) learn how to access, visualize, clean, interpret, and share data, especially open data, using Python, Python-based libraries, and supplementary computational frameworks and 2) understand the theoretical underpinnings of open data and their connections to implementations in the physical and life sciences, government, social sciences, and journalism.

In this course you’ll learn industry-standard agile and lean software development techniques such as test-driven development, refactoring, pair programming, and specification through example. You’ll also learn good object-oriented programming style. We’ll cover the theory and principles behind agile engineering practices, such as continuous integration and continuous delivery.

This class will be taught in a flip-the-classroom format, with students programming in class. We'll use the Java programming language. Students need not be expert programmers, but should be enthusiastic about learning to program. Please come to class with laptops, and install IntelliJ IDEA community edition. Students signing up should be comfortable writing simple programs in Java (or a Java-like language such as C#).

The goal of Data Mining and Analytics is to introduce students to the practical fundamentals of data mining and machine learning with just enough theory to aid intuition building. The course is project-oriented, with a project beginning in class every Thursday and to be completed outside of class by the following week, or two weeks for longer assignments. The in class portion of the project is meant to be collaborative and a time for the instructor to work closely with groups to understand the learning objectives and help them work through any logistics that may be slowing them down. Tuesdays are lecture days which introduce the concepts and algorithms which will be used in the upcoming project. The primary objective is for everyone to leave the class with hands-on data mining and data engineering skills they can confidently apply. Knowledge of basic python programming is a strong prerequisite for this course.

Seminar

One hour colloquium per week. Must be taken on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis. Prerequisites: Ph.D. standing in the School of Information. Colloquia, discussion, and readings designed to introduce students to the range of interests of the school.

This participatory class explores civic engagement and political activism in the information age, through the lens of technology-enabled collective action. We will focus on both the theory and real-world cases of the Internet mobilizing people by spreading alternative views and news — and the parallel emergence of collective identity and civic action. Students will read books on communication power, watch documentary films on the Arab Spring, and do case studies about US, Iran, China, and elsewhere. The class will also look into issues such as online surveillance and filtering, circumvention tools, and how repressive regimes have countered digital activism.

In addition to analytic readings, students will engage in collective knowledge-gathering and construct a resource wiki as public good. Students will do individual or group projects relating to concepts and themes discussed in this course.

This research seminar class is not limited to the graduate students in the School of Information; students from other departments on campus, including undergraduates, are welcome.

Course may be repeated for credit as topic varies. Two to four hours of seminar per week. Prerequisites: Consent of instructor. Topics in information management and systems and related fields. Specific topics vary from year to year. May be repeated for credit, with change of content.

Individual/Group Study

Course may be repeated for credit as topic varies. Four hours of work per week per unit. Must be taken on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis. Formerly Information 310. Discussion, reading, preparation, and practical experience under faculty supervision in the teaching of specific topics within information management and systems. Does not count toward a degree.